Grand Junction (16 page)

The desert that has come now to threaten the Territory with its absolutely undeniable physical presence is like a meteorological copy of the
thing
that is killing machines and men. The desert is acting like a geophysical clone of the Post-Machine.

Together, the two phenomena might be able to destroy the world—but is it possible that their efforts are concentrated on the annihilation of the Territory?

On the annihilation of Gabriel Link de Nova, and the small circle of people who have gathered around him in a last protective stand?

Is the desert, to some degree, part of the
thing’s
plan?

It is at once inconceivable and terribly, utterly logical.

Four men. A makeshift shelter. A sandstorm.

Four men. A territory. A nameless, borderless
thing
.

Four men. A secret. A young man at the heart of that secret.

Four men. Their secrets. Their hopes, their dreams, their past, their present, their future.

And the wind that is striking and shaking everything in this world.

And the sand that cuts and tears anything onto which the wind hurls it.

And the shrieking black-and-purple sky, thundering, roaring like thousands of invisible rotors.

Only the silence intrudes. Chrysler makes tea in his samovar. Pluto Saint-Clair has settled in an armchair in the southwest corner of the Combi-Cube, where a portion of the A380’s fuselage has been soldered.

The Professor sits in an antique leather armchair almost a century old, not far from the small athletic-training area. Yuri is in that part of the single room that is kept for his particular use, near the entry door taken from the crashed Airbus, furnished with his camp bed, a rotating office chair, and the analytic materials in their locked metal boxes.

When Pluto Saint-Clair opened the door of his Combi-Cube to them this morning in Midnight Oil, Yuri and Chrysler had greeted him with well-rehearsed, calm smiles firmly in place on their faces.

“The Professor is here. He’s waiting for you.”

“I would hope so. We didn’t get up at the crack of dawn so we could watch the sunrise,” Chrysler had retorted.

“I’ll explain everything. We need to move the Professor off BlackSky Ridge as fast as possible, but first we should talk. Come in.”

Yuri had followed Chrysler into Pluto Saint-Clair’s large one-room dwelling. They were there. The zero hour. The moment of truth. Meeting,
finally, this man from Texas who participated in the development of the Metastructure.

Both Yuri and Chrysler knew—and each was aware of the other’s knowledge—that they were establishing a connection between the origin and the end, between the old man who designed the last version of the Machine-World on one hand, and the young man who heals machines, bionic implants, and modified organisms on the other. The young man with the guitar, who alone seems able to resist the entity born of the very death of the Professor’s Metamachine.

“Paul Zarkovsky,” Pluto introduced the man, a bit awkwardly. The three men faced one another in the center of the room.

“Chrysler Campbell. This is my associate, Yuri McCoy. We’re very happy to meet you, Professor Zarkovsky,” the Aircrash Circle trafficker said smoothly.

The four of them had then sat down, and long seconds of silence passed during which Yuri and Chrysler calmly—that is, with all sensors in high gear—contemplated the man that Pluto Saint-Clair had been waiting months for, the man who, perhaps, in association with Link de Nova, might be able to vanquish the
thing
and its second mutation, the horror transforming men into modems and leaving nothing of them but a vast catalogue of binary-language organs.

They had stayed that way, unmoving, in Pluto’s Combi-Cube, just as they now sit immobile around the steaming tea that Campbell has just set down on his camping table—prudently welded to the floor of the hybrid cabin—as the storm reaches its maximum ferocity outside. The anemometer is attached to the roof, but Chrysler has managed to cobble together a functional extension reaching inside the Combi-Cube, a small electromechanical dial with teetering numbers that allows him to read with precision the wind speeds in real time.

“One hundred seventeen kilometers an hour. It’s stabilizing,” he says, after consulting the device.

He says nothing more. The silence takes over again, as does the din of the storm.

A similar silence fell during the first seconds of their meeting that morning in Pluto Saint-Clair’s home.

Chrysler had regarded the Professor with his usual cold intensity.

He was going to take his usual no-anesthetic approach, Yuri thought.

“Okay. I think nobody here wants to lose any more time than necessary. So I’ll get right to the point, Mr. Zarkovsky.”

“That was my purpose in coming here as well, Mr. Campbell.”

“But you haven’t yet achieved your purpose, as far as I can tell. And that’s precisely why we’re here. Let’s lay all our cards out on the table. We know about the library coming from Italy, and we’ve agreed to ensure its safety while it’s in Quebec—under certain conditions, of course, that we’ll get to later. But what’s more important, especially here in the Territory, is that you need information. And it so happens that we do, too.”

“Are you talking about an exchange? A ‘deal’? Is that it?”

“No, Professor Zarkovsky. Not exactly; not in the sense that you mean it.”

“In what sense, then?”

“It’s simple, as you’ll see. First, you’re going to tell us everything we need to hear, so that we know precisely what we can
tell you.”

“That doesn’t sound very fair to me,” Pluto Saint-Clair had remarked.

“There’s only one fair thing in this world, Pluto, and that’s death. Which is becoming the world as we speak. Total equality from cradle to grave, which will soon be the same thing. So spare me your humanist couplets, please.”

“In any case, I don’t think I really have a choice,” the Professor said fatalistically, shooting Chrysler a blank gaze.

“You’re wrong, Mr. Zarkovsky. There is always a choice. Certainly between living and dying; perhaps less today than yesterday, but also the choice between betrayal and loyalty, between safety and risk, between defending yourself and letting yourself bleed. The choice between dying for nothing or dying for a reason.”

“Very well,” said the Professor, with a sigh. “What do you want to know?”

“I told you. It’s very simple. Everything. We want to know
everything.”

The Professor drew in a long breath and closed his eyes for a few moments, leaning heavily against the back of his chair.

“Everything” is obviously going to be a whole lot, Yuri had said to himself.

Chrysler knew exactly what he wanted to know, and in what order he wanted to know it. He had written out a sort of preliminary list, using the information Pluto and Yuri already had. Now he wanted to put names and places on the paper, too, as well as the relationships between them.

At the same time, there was the Territory of Grand Junction—the reality, the place that was their ally, and there was the map of this territory. But the map was incomplete. Specifically, it was lacking the “place of origin” of the true storm, the invisible one, the silent one, the one darkening not only the sky but the Earth itself as well. It was lacking exactly what the Professor from southern Texas had come to bring them. The map of the Invisible.

“You’ll begin by telling us about your true duties within the organization that updated the Metamachine. You’ll tell us about this ‘final version’ you helped design.”

Chrysler had delineated, in a few words, the first phase of the operation. It was a commandment pronounced without the slightest apparent authority—Yuri knew his acolyte well. He was simply stating the request as fact, as if it had already been fulfilled.

So the Professor began recounting the final days of the Metastructure, the final days of the World-Machine. The final days of the Human Empire.

“At the end of the 2040s, on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, the Metastructure put out an international call for bids for an overall ‘update.’ Of course, it would be supervising the work, the prehiring selections, the final selections, et cetera. But the system engineers worked in cooperation with it in real time. They modified entire sections of the Metaorganism in simulation processors and the Metastructure chose, oriented, decided—”

“It updated itself using the humans in its service?”

“Yes, exactly. But by 2050, the first team hadn’t made much real progress, so the Metastructure dissolved it and put out a new call for bids, for a second project. I was hired at the beginning of ’51. I had just come back from spending a long time in orbit working for an Australian biotech firm. The new team slaved away like a band of the damned. In two years we made more progress than the previous guys, but—I don’t know—the Metastructure wasn’t really satisfied. Still just quantitative changes, it said. It wanted a qualitative leap. It wanted to be
better
, it said. During the holiday season at the end of ’52, the idea came to me little by little, and in the spring of the following year I proposed a new line of study. It was accepted by the Metastructure.”

“That was the qualitative leap it had been waiting for.”

“Yes. For once, I hadn’t relied on my pure scientific knowledge. Genetics, biochemistry, neurocybernetics, et cetera.”

“On what, then?”

“You won’t believe me.”

“You have no idea how many fairy tales I’ve ended up believing in the last twelve years.”

“I didn’t rely on fairy tales, my dear sir, but on old philosophical works. Leibniz, especially, but also on some ancient patristic texts.”

“Patristic?”

“The Church Fathers. ‘Christian’ philosophy, if you will, dating from before the Renaissance.”

“Ah—and what did this provide?”

“The final version of the Metastructure. The qualitative leap it was seeking. And that motivated it to nominate us—the whole laboratory team—for the Nobel Prize. We carried out many experiments in 2055; then, on April 4, 2056, the Metastructure’s twenty-ninth anniversary, we set the entire updating process in motion in a single night. It was a real success.”

“In view of what came later, the word
success
seems a little euphemistic to me,” says Chrysler dryly.

“On that night, Mr. Campbell, the operation was a total success. It was around two months later, as the laboratory was being dismantled, that we received an urgent message from the Global Governance Bureau. The Metastructure wanted to renew our contract, for at least a year. But no one knew why.”

“Except you, I imagine.”

“We were brought into the loop very quickly, as a matter of fact. The Metastructure was starting to have problems. Phenomena unknown up to that point were developing inside it. It didn’t understand, and it needed us. We got to work. Nonstop. Day and night, for months and months.”

“And?”

“And we didn’t find anything. Around October ’56, the phenomena increased. We were seeing them several times a week, but we still didn’t understand what was happening; at least, we couldn’t determine the cause.”

“What kinds of problems were they?”

“Many kinds. First, the Metastructure alerted us that an unknown force was attacking it, or preparing to attack it. We tested its pseudocortical circuits; there were no paranoid tendencies. Then we determined that the parasitic phenomena affecting it were coming from the uncontrolled emission of photons in its own genetic structure. The emissions kept increasing in intensity and we were still unable to locate their source. Finally
we realized that the update carried out according to my design might very probably be at the origin of our problems. It was a catastrophe.”

“Why? I don’t mean to ask why it was a catastrophe, but why was your update the source of the problems?”

“We weren’t sure. We didn’t have any formal proof, just suppositions. It had to do with my basic idea. An idea that utterly completed the Metastructure’s mission—really, all I had done was to finalize the Megamachine’s ontological project. I gave it the means to be truly, 100 percent, what it was. I assured its destiny, in a way, and that’s exactly what happened.”

“What was this update, Professor?”

“It was what the Metastructure wanted to be but didn’t know how. I gave it the solution. But the solution led to an even larger problem.”

“What did it want to be?”

“It wanted to be itself. I told you. It wanted a body, and it wanted a World. But since the World was its ‘body,’ if it really desired to be incarnated in a real,
individuated body
, it would have to lose the World, and thus ‘de-create’ it. And if it wanted a World, it would have to ‘de-create’ bodies. That’s what I told it. It was part of the fundamental makeup of its double constraint. What the ‘Language-World’ metaprogram was aiming to transcend.”

“You might say it did both.”

“Exactly. All it could do was vacillate constantly between the two poles of de-creation, without ever physically managing to start a process of individuation.”

“But the bizarre thing is that its failure meant our loss.”

“That is the real paradox of this entity. The Metastructure enslaved mankind, yet its disappearance is leading to ultimate slavery. In self-destructing, it was able to create the world it wanted.”

“A desert?”

“Worse than the desert itself. The desert is only a form of the
thing.”

“Then what?”

“A Camp, Mr. Campbell. A Camp-World. A global concentration camp.”

Stretched out near the Airbus emergency-exit hatch that serves as the entry door in Chrysler’s Combi-Cube, Yuri listens to the sandstorm scour the world outside, the Territory, the little cabin in Aircrash Circle. He remembers the night-desert that fell over them with Professor Zarkovsky’s
last words, and the anguish that had turned to calm serenity as he accepted the terrible intrusion of the truth. A Camp-World. A planetary concentration camp. A world where life has no more value than sand, and death no more than the value of a number.